My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  An intense but strictly self-regulated traffic of professionals of various forms of expertise who are doing their busy best to take control of the scene of the hostage taking even as they disassemble it.

  (And yet there’s something violent about this frantic group effort to restore things to the way they were before: like a coercive return to normalcy, which needs to go back to its reassuring self as quickly as possible in defiance of whatever tragedy has occurred.)

  The voice, in Dolby, of the Diabolik who’s come to look after me, asking me with extreme courtesy if I’m okay, and repeating the question after I answer yes without much conviction.

  Me looking into his eyes through the loose slits in the hood that conceals his face, two ovals of different sizes that seem to have been cut hastily and carelessly with a pair of scissors, and then and there I think to myself that the corps these guys belong to—they could be NOCS or GIS or whatever other paramilitary branch—really ought to do something to improve the look of their special agents, because from up close they seem like bargain-basement fetishists.

  The Diabolik continuing to scrutinize me to determine whether I’ve been wounded somewhere on my body or I’m just an idiot.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Counselor?” he asks again, and when I hear someone I don’t even know call me that, and someone wearing a black hood to boot, my senses suddenly sharpen and I discover that I’m the beneficiary of a level of television fame that I could never have imagined was already so solid and so widespread, and so, even though this is the third time that he’s asked me (and I’m actually pretty sick of being asked this question), still I reply: “Yes, I think I really am,” and I even try to reassure him (astonished at myself and at the same time ashamed that I am already so willing to let myself by coddled by my public).

  “You’re covered with blood. Come this way.”

  And then that’s it, we go outside, the smell of fresh air, real light, the insolence of the packed crowd outside the police barriers pushing and shoving to see us up close (to see things up close, I think to myself: that’s what audiences want). The roar from the crowd is so overwhelming that I stagger, but Diabolik steps in front of me, acting as a human shield (probably just a conditioned reflex, I certainly hope so anyway, because I don’t think I actually need a bodyguard); there are shouts, piercing whistles, and variously personalized vocalizations (“Mythical Malinconico”; “Amazing!”; “Waaa!”; “Brother!”; “You’re incredible”), every one of them making me feel even more of a poor fool than the last. Scully comes toward me, her face wreathed in smiles. “You really were perfect,” she says; I look at her in disbelief and she says: “You okay?” “Thanks, fine,” I reply automatically as I realize that at least four national television networks are there with their vans and immediately after that I say to myself: “Perfect at what? He shot himself in the head, the poor guy”; after which a horde of journalists and photographers assail me as if I owed them money, flashes go off in my face, I feel a close-up surge of heat as if from a sun-lamp, I’m blinded, Diabolik shouts for them to get back, they all blithely ignore him, cascades of questions from right and left, microphones and tape recorders just inches from my mouth: “What does a person feel in moments like the ones you just experienced?”; “In your opinion, would the engineer have shot you if Captain Apicella hadn’t arrived?”; “Do you entirely disapprove of his actions or do you feel some degree of solidarity with him?”; “Do you feel it’s safe to say that this has been the most important case of your career?”; “Do you think you won or lost?” I don’t answer any of them because my head is spinning and most of all because I can’t fathom how anyone could even think that a miserable wretch who’s just emerged from a situation of this kind could be sufficiently clearheaded to answer such brazen questions, and, what’s more, such theoretical ones, but there are certain reporters who’ll take anything, they make no distinction between impulsive outbursts and considered statements and they’re certainly not about to dismiss the former in favor of the latter: in fact if someone is speaking spontaneously and puts their foot in it, so much the better. If you want to know the truth, I’ve always been afraid of being taken literally, so you can imagine how I feel about being quoted or even worse, filmed. Wait a second, I think to myself, this is the last scene in the first Rocky, when Sylvester Stallone steps out of the ring all dinged up, ignoring the paparazzi who are blinding him with their flashguns and the reporters assailing him with questions and just starts shouting his girlfriend’s name at the top of his lungs. It wouldn’t be bad if I started shouting: “Adriaaan!!” over and over again, there’s even a chance that the jackals would beat a hasty retreat. Speaking of which, I have an Adrian of my own: that is, I do in theory. Why isn’t she here, why don’t I see her?

  Luckily I don’t have time to focus on this dilemma, because Diabolik drags me away and shortly thereafter I find myself in an ambulance where a young doctor, courteous like everyone else (the nice part about being treated courteously again and again is that you feel like you’re cashing a check with accrued interest), asks me to take my clothes off, and I reply that there’s no need because I’m not hurt, I got some of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s blood on my jacket, but I’m fine, really, just fine.

  “Please, Counselor,” he insists, “it’s standard procedure, let me examine you, I’ll only take a minute.”

  Counselor, eh? I think; and I immediately take off my jacket.

  The guy has a stethoscope pressed to my chest when, escorted by Scully and Diabolik, Alagia and Alfredo arrive, frantic and relieved at the same time.

  God, how young they look.

  They throw their arms around me and even knock the doctor aside, but he doesn’t complain, in fact he seems pleased as he withdraws from the heartwarming family scene that we’re offering him, something straight out of a Barilla pasta commercial.

  There are times when I’m thankful I have children. This is one of them.

  “You can’t even imagine what we’ve been through in the past few hours,” says Alagia, her voice cracking with emotion, and she squeezes me so hard that I have to give her a tap on the shoulder to make her loosen her grip a little.

  “Papà, really, does everything have to happen to you?” asks Alf.

  Which is a little bit like the erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass telling the horror director Pupi Avati that it’s time he started making some family films for a change.

  So I limit myself to giving him a look with my eyelids lowered halfway. He does his best to cover his ass, just barely pulling it off.

  “You enjoyed youself, eh?”

  Let me tell you the last stunt Alf pulled, just to make clear what the young man I’m looking at right now is capable of. He requested an interview with the fascist squatter community CasaPound for some blog or other, I don’t remember which; he busted their balls so relentlessly that they finally gave in and agreed to see him, and Alf, the minute he sat down, started the conversation by announcing that he was a communist. Those guys looked around, assuming they were on an episode of Scherzi a parte, then they tossed him out without even bothering to beat him up.

  So you can understand.

  Alagia, finally mastering her emotion at seeing me again, releases me from her embrace and starts winding up for one of her rants.

  Let’s hear how I’ve come up short this time.

  “Do you know,” she begins, already in a black fury, “that those idiots weren’t going to let us through? We had to show them our ID, can you believe it?”

  Whereupon I look at Scully, treating her to a display of paternal mortification.

  She shrugs.

  “And that’s not all, when they saw mine they even gave me a weird look. I had to explain to them that Alfredo is my brother, can you believe it? I’ve never felt so humiliated in my life.”

  She seems to be blaming me. As if it were somehow my fault that she’s the da
ughter of one of my ex-wife’s exes and so she has a different last name from me. A tremendous lump forms in my throat on seeing how offended she is.

  “Come on, that’s enough now,” I tell her. “Come here.”

  “Kids,” the doctor breaks in, “I understand how worried you’ve been about your father, but right now it would be better if you let him . . .”

  That’s as much as he’s able to get out before Alagia, just as promptly as I expected, barks in his direction, silencing him on the spot.

  “What the hell do you know about it? Do you mind?!”

  The poor guy grabs his stethoscope with both hands and puts his cervical transmission into reverse, astonished to find such an apparently amiable young woman to be capable of unleashing such a wave of unjustified bile (and make it seem so personal to boot).

  I bring my hand to my forehead as my little girl tears into him.

  “What do you know about how it feels to see your father trapped in such an absurd situation, glued to a disgusting television set without knowing what will happen to him, afraid that from one moment to the next that that miserable wretch might lose his head and start shooting at random, forced to accept the idea that at that very moment hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of assholes are enjoying the show live, maybe even secretly hoping for someone to get killed. Sweet Jesus, you doctors are all the same, all of you believe that your words have the power to shed light on every tragedy, treating us ordinary mortals like so many imbeciles who just like to make things difficult for themselves for no good reason. Well, get this into your head: that’s not the way it is!”

  You should see the appalled silhouettes of those present when she’s done with her tirade. The doctor, his face patchy and red, looks around at us frantically in the hopes of finding some fellow feeling, but no one comes to his aid. Scully, seized by an irresistible physiognomic impulse, looks at me, as if inspecting my features in search of the traces of some hereditary hysteria that I might have endowed upon my little princess.

  Diabolik is a masterpiece. Without a doubt the most scandalized of all. The mask, oddly enough, makes his embarrassment even more unmistakable. If the cartoonist Andrea Pazienza were here, he’d draw him as a puppet or a doll: a sausage figure with stylized arms and legs, a black ball with tiny eyes for a head, and directly above a nice floating question mark.

  As for Alf, he comes this close to laughing out loud.

  I glare at him angrily, promising him a good hard smack if he doesn’t put a lid on it.

  “Ehm . . . What about your mother?” I ask.

  Alagia replies, and the storm abruptly subsides. Whenever her mother is involved, the young Amazon suddenly discovers a talent for diplomacy.

  “She stayed here until we were sure that nothing bad had happened to you,” she recites, betraying a hint of shame that she unsuccessfully tries to dilute in the sugar water that follows. “She sends you her love and apologizes, but she just couldn’t stay, it was all too emotional for her.”

  The rhetorical emphasis that she employs in reporting this pathetic justification is simply intolerable.

  I know perfectly well how Nives likes to use calculated absence as a way of magnifying her own importance, especially in sensitive situations. I know even better how eager she is to regain the allure that she lost for me when I definitively chose another woman over her. And I would have willingly overlooked her present absence, since deep down her exhibitionistic strategies don’t make me like her any less. But if there’s one thing I absolutely refuse to tolerate, it’s the emotional vassalage that our daughter shows by testifying on her behalf, spouting her mother’s unrepeatable monstrosities like a trained parrot.

  I delicately caress my face with my left hand as if to console myself, while also quelling the sudden surge of that recurrent rancor which the more identical it seems to the last time it washed over me, the more offensive I find it, mocking in its persistence, indifferent to my attempts to dismiss it; but the mitigating effects of my small autoerotic gesture are almost immediately shipwrecked, because I’m simply incapable of restraining myself.

  “Oh, of course,” I reply contemptuously, “if she’d come to say hello, she might have wound up drowning in her own tears, that much is obvious”—and here I take a very short pause before coming to the point I care most about—“but how dare you contribute to these miserable charades of hers. Aren’t you ashamed of always serving as her spokesperson? What are you, her press secretary?”

  Touché.

  She flies into such a rage that it looks to me as if her face is swelling up. If she’d had anything in her hands, I’m positive she would have thrown it at me.

  “Go fuck yourself, Vincenzo.”

  “Go fuck myself? Go fuck yourselves,” I say, just to be fair and balanced, as long as I’m on the warpath. “You always take that bitch’s side.”

  “Hey, what’d I do wrong?” Alf asks, justifiably.

  I have to give that a few seconds’ thought.

  “Well, you were here as long as your mother was, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “Sure. So?”

  “Then why didn’t you tell her to stay?”

  “Hey, stupid,” he replies with an icy calm, “the two of you are divorced, in case you’ve forgotten. You live with another woman in fact. You want to tell me where she is?”

  Oh, shit, I think to myself.

  Then a maelstrom of slimy self-pity pulls me under, centrifuges me, and spits me back out in a para-vegetative state.

  I’ve never been so completely silenced in my life.

  What I need right now is a speech therapist.

  It’s true. Alf is right. I have a woman in my life, and she ought to be here right now. Forget about Nives. I may be taking it out on her, but the one I’m really angry with is Alessandra Persiano (or, perhaps I should say, myself).

  “Alfre’,” his sister scolds him rhetorically for punching below the belt: a solicitude that I would hardly have expected from her and that I certainly don’t deserve, considering that I attacked her just a minute ago (she’s a great lady, my little girl).

  “No, sorry,” Alf rebels, arguing back with understandable vehemence, “he’s complaining that Mamma left and he even blames us for it; instead of worrying about his girlfriend, who ought to be here and isn’t. I mean, what the fuck.”

  Such a solemn and definitive analysis that, after the concluding “what the fuck,” we all plunge into a silence worthy of a university library.

  Scully and Diabolik turn to look at each other for what must be the fifth time since we started putting on our show. If they keep this up, they’re bound to fall in love.

  The doctor seems seriously embarrassed. We must really have torn to shreds the pleasing picture of the happy little reunited family that he thought he was admiring until just a short while ago.

  And then, no big deal: they take me to the hospital, I’d say basically just so they can release me, and there I learn that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo is in the OR, where they’ve been working feverishly for some time now to remove the bullet. Half his body is paralyzed. No one knows if he’ll ever emerge from the coma, and if so, in what condition.

  While I’m there I run into Assistant District Attorney Garavaglia (actually, he comes looking for me), who feeds me a song and dance about what a fantastic job I did (way to go!) of maintaining control of that hostage taking “that aspired to become a trial.” He says that if I hadn’t been up to the cultural challenge that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo threw at me with that “surreal courtroom process,” right now they’d be about to declare the proceedings null and void due to the death of the the defendant instead of finally being able to bring mob boss Caldiero (right, that was his name!) to trial for his crimes; that what happened is serious because it could set a precedent for those who have lost faith in the justice system, etc. etc.

 
Now, I understand that a district attorney has to give certain speeches, especially in certain circumstances (though they could be a little less pretentious in the way they express themselves, truth be told); and I can’t even say he’s entirely wrong. But still there’s something about it that just doesn’t add up (something that, if anything, in fact, I find vaguely unsettling) in this attempt to condense events into a single narrative, using logic itself as a sort of packing tape. Maybe it’s just that I’ve never liked potted histories.

  I have no wish to get into an argument with him (in part because he really isn’t a bad guy), but still I have a thing or two to say to him.

  “Did you really find the ‘courtroom process’ all that surreal, Dottore?” I ask him. “Because as far as I could tell, we talked about a number of very matter-of-fact things: a fugitive from justice who, undisturbed, frequents a supermarket where he knows he can find his favorite yogurt; a young murder victim who’s under a defamatory suspicion; a desperate father who’s been pushed to the point of taking literally the example set by television of a criminal trial reduced to unbridled gossip . . .”

  He nods, both while I’m talking and after I’m done, though I don’t know whether he’s doing it in preparation for arguing against my points or just as a way of making a mental note of them.

  “What’s surreal is the idea of being able to resolve these problems with a spectacular and violent act, Counselor,” he objects politely. “Believe me, the engineer has all my human sympathy and understanding, but I cannot accept what he did. I say it as a citizen first, and as a magistrate second. Trials should be conducted by us, not by television. Your summation, Counselor, was an impassioned plea on behalf of the law and of the necessity to judge crimes according to jurisdiction. You dialectically demolished, one tile at a time, the entire inquisitorial arsenal that the engineer had erected to justify his plan. You conducted yourself as a genuine criminal lawyer, the kind I hadn’t seen for a good long time.”